Images: Finding, Using, and Making

Make Your Infographic Visual

The use of graphics and images in infographics is just as carefully chosen as data graphs and charts. Making your infographic visual with meaningful and well placed graphics helps convey a clearer and easier to grasp message for readers. Be careful to avoid too many decorative graphics that can distract or detract from the overall goal.

Visualizing Processes

Infographics do not always have graphs. Process diagrams also count as informative visualizations. Check out the section on “Visualizing Ideas” in the Make Your Infographic Visual poster on the Telling a Visual Story page.

Learn more on Telling a Visual Story

Online Tools for Images & Diagrams

Create your own diagrams, maps, and more with these online tools, and export it to your infographic. There are many options online, these are just a few recommendations.

AutoDraw for images
Google Drawings for diagrams and images
MapChart for custom maps
Draw.io for a variety of diagrams

Creating your own images

Even if you don’t see yourself as an artist, it can be faster to draw the image you need than find one that is Creative Commons Licensed and suits your infographic.

Draw image on paper (you can color it too).
Take a picture of it with your phone or use a scanner.
Send picture to your computer. (Optional: Edit the picture.)
Import your custom image into your infographic.

Working with images

For whatever tool you decide to use to create your infographic, try to figure out or search online for tutorials for these helpful image manipulations.

Crop an image to cut out the parts you don’t want
Scale an image bigger or smaller while retaining the original proportions to avoid stretching it.
Arrange images so you see the ones you want at the front or on top of other images.
Arrange an image to be a background image for your infographic so it is at the back or behind other images and text.

Creative Commons and Image Permissions

Finding images that already exist to use in your infographic can be time-consuming and difficult. To create infographics for publication on SciJourner.org, you must have permission to use images or you create them yourself. Content creators who want to share their work for others to use will often give it a “Creative Common License,” which allows others to use it for free.

There are different types of Creative Common Licenses, and each one gives you a different type of permission to use the image. You can read more about the different types of Creative Common Licenses here.

Sources of Creative Commons Licensed Images